


The Literal Food of Love

by Castillon02



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Cooking, Crack, Fluff and Humor, I shouldn't need to say it, M/M, RPF, but I don't know any of these people and all RPF is based solely on their public personas, from their TV shows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:28:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25148476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Castillon02/pseuds/Castillon02
Summary: Five chefs Bond has a crush on and one he loves.
Relationships: James Bond/Aaron Sanchez, James Bond/Emeril Lagasse, James Bond/Gordon Ramsay, James Bond/Jacques Torres, James Bond/Q, James Bond/Rachael Ray
Comments: 24
Kudos: 53
Collections: 007 Fest Fancreations





	The Literal Food of Love

**Author's Note:**

> Written for 007 Fest 2020.

The first time it happened, Bond stumbled into the yacht’s galley without knowing what he was in for. In his mind, Mr. Cacao Thumb was simply a smuggler who specialized in exotic cocoa beans and had a trade in bio-weapons on the side in order to finance his chocolate habit. 

And then Bond went looking for a snack (e.g., snooping) and saw Jacques Torres, renowned French pastry chef and chocolatier, sculpting a chocolate molecule in the kitchen. “ _Bonsoir_?” the chef asked, raising his eyebrows in a way that somehow shouted, IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE NOT-EVIL, M’AIDEZ, S’IL VOUS PLAIT. He had a cumbersome gadget on his wrist that was probably a detonator, which meant he had probably been made to swallow an explosive. 

Bond said, “What the fuck?” 

Jacques Torres gestured at the chocolate molecule and said, “I have been told that my chocolate infographics are an essential part of Mr. Thumb’s presentation to his clients. He was, eh, quite passionate about the subject.” 

Thumb was a kidnapper as well as a bio-terrorist. Brilliant. “Tell me what his plan is, and I’ll get you out of here,” Bond said. 

Jacques Torres shrugged and delivered a copy of Thumb’s planned monologue with the help of the chocolate infographics as visual and gustatory aids. “You can see that the liquified brain is still in the planning stages,” he added a trifle apologetically. “It is a very complex organ.” 

“Right,” Bond said numbly. “Unfortunate; love to have seen it, big fan of your work. I’ll be right back. You stay here and incapacitate anyone who tries to make you leave.” 

“What, what? Incapacitate? _Moi_?” 

When Bond came back, having killed Thumb, torched his laboratory, and discovered that the whole detonator thing was a bluff, Torres nearly brained him with his marble cutting board. A glance behind Torres showed that at least two other men had fallen prey to his bludgeoning. “Nailed it,” Bond said, and didn't understand why Torres snorted. 

“Chef tip: the muscles are essential for good pastry!” Torres said. “Or at least, they are when you do not have accessibility devices!” He clutched the marble cutting board in his hands and only let it go once he had been delivered safely back to his New York apartment. “Take this,” he told Bond on his doorstep, shoving it into Bond’s arms. “I do not need the reminder.” 

Bond had been hoping that he’d be invited in to lick some chocolate off of Torres’ adorable French body, but he was trying to be better about not having sex with traumatized people anyway, so he took the cutting board and left. 

\---

“Why does it have to be marble?” Bond asked Q on the way home, and in his ear, Q told him a lot of things about the importance of temperature control and how fussy chocolate and pastry dough could be. 

Q turned out to be incredibly passionate about the proper ways to make a pie crust. It was cute. 

\--- 

Bond started to sense a trend when he encountered Emeril Lagasse making shrimp creole for a KKK-based villain who called himself Mr. Medium and claimed to be able to speak to dead people. 

Emeril stared at him, looking from his kitchen captors, who had holes in their heads, to Bond, who had his Walther in his hand. “You just blew them away! Bam!” 

“It’s a risk when ‘terrorist’ is your profession,” Bond said dryly. 

Emeril’s eyes flicked behind Bond’s back and one of his hands dipped into a mortar filled with spices. 

Bond ducked, missing the Cajun spices that Emeril threw in Medium’s face, and used the distraction to shoot Medium dead. “Follow me. And bring the spices,” he told Emeril. He had a feeling that chefs felt better when they had something in their hands. 

Emeril nodded. “Let’s kick it up a notch,” he said, and they fought their way through the remaining Klan members and out of the old plantation house, escaping in a 1969 Dodge Charger that they found in the garage. 

When Bond pulled up in front of the nearest hospital, Emeril said, “Thanks. Let’s never do this again,” and left the mortar and pestle in the passenger seat for him. 

Shame. Bond definitely could have kicked Emeril’s sex life up a notch, too. 

\---

“Why the hell does a twenty-first century chef have a mortar and pestle?” Bond asked Q after Emeril was out of the car. 

Q talked about muddling and natural oils, but he also said that pestling took forever and he was quite happy with his spice grinder for a lot of the traditional mortar and pestle applications. 

“Of course, you can’t stick a spice grinder into someone,” Q said. 

“What?” Bond asked sharply. 

“Pestles are just the right shape, you know,” Q said, a wicked smile in his voice. “Maybe Emeril wanted you to have more fun than you thought.” 

“You _minx_ ,” Bond said admiringly. 

\---

Rachael Ray’s kidnapping made the news, so Bond wasn’t actually surprised to find her in Mondo Mammary’s lair. The two women were shouting at each other, and Bond paused in the air vent above the kitchen to listen. 

“Look, I said I wanted ‘cock oh von,’ you’re a chef, so make some goddamn VON COCK! I have twelve different gangs at this meeting tonight, and they want to be wowed, you hear me?” 

There was the sound of a pan banging against the stove. “I don’t know why you expect me to cook gourmet! I specialize in thirty-minute meals that are accessible for home cooks! You should have kidnapped fucking Cat Cora, you dumb fuck!” The distinct noise of a skillet impacting someone’s skull resounded through the kitchen. 

After a moment, Mammary laughed. “What the fuck? Your stupid frying pan is so lightweight that you can’t even knock me out with it!” 

“It’s ACCESSIBLE and EASY TO CLEAN, and I was distracting you from the E-V-O-O, you bitch!” 

A bottle shattered. Another pan crashed into Bond’s air vent. Time to intervene, he decided, kicking the bottom panel until it opened into the kitchen. 

“And coq au vin is the wrong thing to make for a bunch of gangsters anyway!” Ray was saying. “Make them some fucking burgers!” On one side of the kitchen island, she wielded a sheet tray like a shield, a butcher’s knife in her other hand. 

On the other side of the island, Mammary was in the process of lighting the rag she’d stuffed into a wine bottle. 

“You’re meant to let the wine breathe,” Bond told her, and then they were going at it, Mammary’s mixed martial arts skills against his long career of killing people. Unlike with Rachael Ray, Mammary had zero incentive to keep him alive, and Bond found himself dodging a flurry of brass-knuckled punches and kicks from her pointed heels. She cornered him between the refrigerator and the dishwasher, but a sheet pan to the back of her head knocked her off balance for just long enough that Bond could brain her with a knife block. 

“Jesus Christ,” Rachael Ray said, still holding on to the sheet pan. Then she said, “Fuck, my image contract! If anyone asks, I said ‘Oh my gravy,’ got it?” 

It was such a relentlessly American thing to say that Bond threw his head back and laughed. Ray cooked the burgers she’d wanted while they waited for the authorities to show up, claiming it helped her calm down, and Bond found some candles in a drawer and set them up in little ramekins for ambiance. 

“Good, right?” Ray asked, taking an enormous bite out of her burger. 

“Very,” Bond said, looking at her, even though he hadn’t taken a bite yet. 

“I’m married, Romeo,” Ray said dryly. 

“Just enjoying the look of the dish,” Bond assured her, which made her grin. 

He found a deluxe set of her signature cookware waiting for him at Six when he reported in. 

“A lot of chefs prefer steel and copper cookware for a superior maillard reaction, but there’s something to be said for easy cleanup,” Q told him. He patted the box of pots and pans and sounded utterly condescending and definitely not jealous when he said, “It’s not a bad acquisition, really.” 

Bond rolled his eyes. As long as he could make breakfast foods in them, they were fine. 

\---

Aarón Sánchez was doing everything a captive was supposed to do: appeasing, personalizing, making himself a real human in the eyes of Doctor Yea, who had abducted him to feed the workforce in his subterranean lair and, for tonight, had had Sánchez prepare a private meal for himself and his ‘unexpected guest.’ Bond was never going to get a better chance. 

“So you see,” Sánchez was saying in a pre-dinner monologue, “this might seem like a simple braised beef stew, but everything about this recipe is an homage to my grandfather’s heritage, a history of food which has been passed down for generations. And I also need to mention how this works with sustainability and local farm-to-table eating, which---” 

Listening to him, Bond kind of wanted Sánchez to talk to him about food until he forgot what it was like to kill things. What a well-spoken man. Would he talk like this in bed? 

Sánchez glanced at him and the look in his eyes said, ‘Hurry the fuck up.’ 

Bond shook the sentiment from his head, took advantage of Doctor Yea’s distraction, and shoved Yea’s face into the pot of stew until he stopped moving. “It’s done,” he said. 

Sánchez, who had turned away and frozen, unclenched enough to breathe a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he said. “I was running out of things to say to distract him.” 

“You might still have to do some fast talking around his people,” Bond warned. Yea’s manpower was still around. 

But Sánchez shook his head. “I told Doctor Yea that I needed some maltitol as a special ingredient for dessert, and since things seemed to be coming to a boil with you here, I added it to tonight’s dinner,” he said. 

“Maltitol?” Bond asked. 

“It’s the same thing they put in those sugar free gummy bears that give people explosive diarrhea,” Sánchez said, looking smug. “If they ate their stew, they’ll be incapacitated.” 

Bond abruptly remembered from his dossier that Sánchez had once cooked Masaharu Morimoto to a draw on _Iron Chef_. Not a man to fuck with in the kitchen.

“It’s important to let yourself be inspired by local ingredients, but don’t be afraid to include that special something either,” Sánchez said. “Balance.” 

After exfiltrating, they stole a boat and motored away from Doctor Yea’s island and back towards the cursed Florida mainland, where Bond kept Sánchez company in a bar until one of his friends could come get him. 

“Don’t get me wrong,” Sánchez said after downing half a bottle of red, “you’re horrifying, but it’s the sort of horrifying I want next to me in case someone wants to get revenge for the shit stew.” 

That was fair. Maybe Bond should put it on a card, get a testimonial for the next kidnapped chef. Fucking bourgeousie criminals with their celebrity food fad. 

\---

“That was interesting with the maltitol,” Q told Bond as he was returning his equipment. “I’ve worked with sugar and other sugar substitutes, but I avoided that one for obvious reasons. Should have handed it off to the toxins group.” 

“ _You_ belong in the toxins group,” Bond told him, because Q was wearing a hideous jumper with a science pun on it and was somehow still managing to be attractive, which had to be worthy of chemical study. 

Q raised his eyebrows. “If that’s so, then you can walk me there, Double-Oh Horrifying.” 

“Only if you take off the jumper first,” Bond said. “I couldn’t possibly be seen with it.” 

Q held his eyes for a long moment, and then he pulled the jumper over his head in a smooth movement that ruffled his curly hair. Underneath, he was wearing a lovely tailored shirt that brought out his eyes...and which had also been embroidered with a science pun. _If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the precipitate!_

“Diabolical,” Bond said admiringly, and he returned to Q Branch intermittently throughout the day, observing as the knot of Q’s tie slackened, as Q rolled his sleeves up to reveal his well-muscled forearms, as the collar of Q’s shirt loosened enough that if Bond wanted, he could tug it open with his fingers and press a kiss right against the swell of his Adam’s apple. 

And Bond wanted. Increasingly. 

\---

Bond’s latest mission had two objectives. First, and most importantly, to stop Honkfeld, who was heading up an organization called Haunter that wanted to implement a virus that had made Q’s face pale when he’d seen the code. Secondly, to “Rescue Gordon Ramsay while you’re at it, Bond, it’s been seventy-two hours and he’s a national fucking treasure.” 

Bond’s mission was helped by the fact that Haunter seemed to be in the middle of a civil war when he arrived at their desert fortification. All of the guards’ attentions were turned inwards, which made it easy to scale the building with his Q-Branch-issued grappling hook and drop into the kitchen through a skylight. 

Ramsay was simultaneously managing dinner prep and rallying his troops. “What do we want?” he shouted. 

“Workers’ rights! Better food! Not to be fed to a shark!” a crowd of people chanted, all of them wearing white aprons over Haunter’s trademark black turtleneck uniform. 

“Why do we want it?” Ramsay asked. 

“BECAUSE WE’RE WORTH IT!” 

“Fuck, yes, we are!” Ramsay said, and then, “Anthony, put that steak in the fucking bin, you’ve overcooked it, you louse’s tit. Try again.” 

Anthony gave Ramsay a simultaneously crushed yet adoring look and hurried to the bin with his skillet. 

“I want dinner service ready in half an hour and the troops ready to rotate in ten minutes!” Ramsay ordered his team. “And YOU!” He pointed at Bond, who, having ascertained that his secondary target was handling himself, was in the process of sneaking towards a side door. 

Bond froze. 

“Aarón told me about you. I expect you to kill that Honkfeld person,” Ramsay said. “But don’t you dare touch those sharks. As if I’d serve fucking sharkfin soup! What an arsehole!” 

“No dead sharks, understood,” Bond said, and he grabbed a tray of food and fled before Ramsay could think of any other orders to give him. 

The Aprons had secured the kitchen, the mess hall, and the nearby armory, and had erected cafeteria table barricades to defend their position. All of them moved with vigor and determination. The Haunternecks, attacking from the other side, seemed sluggish in comparison. They had littered the battlefield with crisps packets, which seemed to be their only means of sustenance. 

Bond threw the food tray into their midst and ran past them while they fought over the plates of steak. 

\--- 

By the time Bond came back from dealing with Honkfeld, Ramsay had already acquired a mobile phone and seemed to be making plans to transport Honkfeld’s tank of sharks to one of his restaurants. 

“They’re all in the kitchen trying to figure out how to make macarons, the poor bastards,” he told Bond in an undertone, waving a hand to indicate the remnants of the apron army. “I told them that whoever does the best job has a chance of working with me after they get out of prison.” 

Competence and manipulating people had always turned Bond on. He said, “Don’t suppose you want to fuck before the shark handlers get here?” 

“Married,” Ramsay said lightly. “Also, Rachael Ray says ‘hi.’” He brandished his mobile. “She just added me to her kidnapped chefs support group and you’ll be happy to know that they all agree that you’re a, quote-unquote, ‘hot piece of ass.’" He leaned around Bond and snapped a photo. “Jacques wanted a picture of it,” he explained. 

Bond sighed. He knew he was a hot piece of ass, but so far that hadn’t helped him gain access to any of that famous ‘cock au chef.’ 

Ramsay patted his shoulder. “Tell you what,” he said. “Let me know the next time you have a date night, and you can bring them to my restaurant.” 

“What, free?” Bond asked. He didn't usually dine at Michelin-starred restaurants unless Six was footing the bill for it. 

“Absolutely not,” Ramsay said firmly. “It’s called a fucking profit margin. But I’ll throw in some wine and make sure you get a table.” 

Bond squinted. It felt like Ramsay had found a way to screw him out of hundreds of pounds and make Bond thankful for it, which was sexy but also disturbing. Hopefully the shark acquisition wasn’t a sign that Bond would be seeing him in a professional capacity in the future. 

\---

When Bond returned to his flat, the lights were on. An incredible savory scent was wafting out of his kitchen, the likes of which had never before been generated in there except when he opened a take-away box. 

Q stood at the stove, stirring a risotto. Tabby-patterned socks peeked out from under his blue-checked trousers, and he wore a dark apron over his work shirt. “While you were rescuing chefs, I was mastering the culinary arts,” he said, turning, and he lifted the spoon from the pan and held it up to Bond’s lips. “Taste?” 

His green eyes held Bond’s, the cheeky dare in them flickering to uncertainty as Bond stayed silent. 

Bond loved risotto. Among other things. “You have to know,” he said finally, “that I wouldn’t be able to stop at one taste.” 

Q’s red-bitten lips curved in a satisfied smirk. “It’s a good thing I plan to keep cooking for you, then, isn’t it?” He put the spoon back in the pan and leaned in. “Don’t be stupid, Bond. I’m not a meal you can fill up on.” He curled his hand around Bond’s neck and pulled him into a kiss. 

It was true, Bond realized. In some ways, the heart had a much greater capacity than the stomach. “Do you want a chocolate heart from Jacques Torres?” he asked in between kisses. “I can probably make that happen. Just don’t ask for a brain.” 

Q laughed. “The only heart I want is your shrivelled James Bond one,” he said. Then he paused, sniffing the air, and turned back to the stove, picking up the spoon to start stirring again. “And right now I want it waiting for this risotto to be done. You can kiss the cook when dinner’s on the table.” 

Bond had met incredible chefs and he had dined in Michelin-starred restaurants around the world, but it was only with Q’s food that he tasted the best kind of secret ingredient: love. 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a play on the line from Twelfth Night, "If music be the food of love, play on."
> 
> Thank you for reading! Constructive criticism is welcome. <3


End file.
